"Her story," said Ross, aiming his cigar-end at a phosphorescent patch of ocean, "was discreditable enough to be true." He drew an immense red handkerchief from the pocket of his pyjamas, and wiped his extensive forehead, muttering, "As far as a woman ever tells the truth about herself."
I sat on in silence waiting for the epigrams to end and the narrative to begin.
It was a stifling night off the East Coast of Africa. A wind that blew from the Equator and followed a crowded ship made sleep impossible. Nightly it drove Ross and myself on deck to spend the intolerable hours in talk.
I did not know much about Ross; no one on board did. A big man with a walrus moustache and a bald head, he had joined the vessel at an unusual East Coast port with few possessions—a rifle or two, and a green kit bag. His preposterous opinions were enunciated with the precise utterance of a spinster, and punctuated by pulls at a virulent black cigar. He knew men and cities; he knew Africa at its heart, where are neither men nor cities.
Our mutual acquaintanceship exhausted, we had drifted to anecdotes of the improbabilities that happen daily in that improbable continent.
"You can never tell what the most normal folk will do," he had said. "One of the most charming girls I know—in three weeks she and her husband had reduced the Decalogue to ribbons...." He broke off, and I had difficulty in inducing him to begin again.
"The girl," he said at last, between puffs of his cigar, "came to me for advice. This implied no particular compliment to my wisdom, since I was the only disinterested white man for a hundred miles. I told her that only fools gave advice, and only wise men took it.
'God knows I'm not wise,' she said, 'but I'd do anything to...'
'My dear, I'll do my best,' I said when I saw that she did not mean to finish her sentence, 'but even for that I must hear a bit more.' She looked at me a little startled, then threw up her chin and plunged into her story. And, as I said, by most standards, it did her little enough credit. Unless courage covers as much as charity. Courage is even needed for a proud woman to tell a man whom she'd met half a dozen times the full story of her ... 'indiscretions' shall we call them?" He paused and seemed to ponder the qualities and failings of his heroine. "Still, most of the other animals have courage," he added. "And no doubt if she was to stay sane, she had to get things clear in her own head. Anyhow, she spared me no detail or digression in the telling of her deplorable history."
Ross got up and walked heavily to the rail where he stood staring down at the sea, which parted before our bows with the sound and motion of split silk. His voice came to me a little muted by the night.
"I didn't know the Sinclairs well," he continued, "but by using my eyes at our occasional meetings, I had a pretty correct idea how matters stood. And Archie told me as much as he told any one. More, while I was nursing him through three days of delirium."
I ventured to suggest that it would be more interesting for me if he began the story at the beginning instead of the end. He shook his head: "The writer of the Book of Genesis was the last story teller who could begin at the beginning. So much has gone before.
If you want the beginning, you'll have to listen, for instance, to the history of the house of Cleverly, from its first earl, the bandit, to its last earl, the bankrupt, while I trace you Norah's inheritance of the maxim of that race of rakes ... and occasional heroes—'Risk before Repute.'
And don't forget we'd have to blend in a survey of Archie's hard-headed lowland forbears, measure the immeasurable pride of his Highland mother, estimate the weight of the legal tradition he inherited from sire and grandsire, which sees both sides of everything, and commits itself to nothing, superimpose Archie's own Oxford training which forbade him ever to back his fancy—all that made him that loyal, hardworking, and in every way estimable stone of stumbling and rock of offence to poor Norah.
And then the scene is set in Africa. By now the power of Africa has passed into platitude, but like most platitude, there's something in it.
Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith, who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.
Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography, psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."
"Plainer men," went on Ross after a pause, "see there no strange gods, see rather the dangerous absence of that unromantic Deity, Public Opinion. In civilised life man's every action is preordained by the opinion of his fellows.
Your young revolutionary may deny this, claiming that he, at any rate, is a free agent. But is not he too bound on the wheel of revolutionary opinion? Does not the Bolshevik follow the tradition of his class—to spit at a bourgeois or whatever it may be—as slavishly as a Die-hard peer?
In the solitudes, the force is unborn and the individual is left, now hell is discredited, a law to himself.
So if you ask me to foretell the change that Africa would work in any given individual, I say, 'Take his ruling weakness, his Lowest Common Failing: cube it. The result will be the man when Africa has done with him.'"
Ross re-lit his atrocious cigar.
"By now," he said, "you must regret that you asked for the beginning of my story.
Are you not convinced that it is better to let me start in the middle of the story and incidentally in the middle of a lake in the middle of Africa?"
"Suppose yourself dead," he continued, taking my silence for assent, "and seeking variety from twanging harps round a glassy sea or banging tambourines in a medium's cabinet, you look down from the upper air, one day in October, 1921. Suppose your eye falls on Tanganyika—that sapphire coloured cleft which runs eight hundred miles long by fifty wide through the endless forests of Central Africa, with the old German Colony to the right, Belgian Congo to the left, North Eastern Rhodesia at the near end.
Not much humanity for you to patronise: every thirty miles or so along the edge of the water a cluster of thatched huts providing a measure of shelter for a handful of savages who live on fish and mangoes, careless of the future, indifferent to the past. Every 300 miles or so, at a Catholic Mission, a couple of white-robed Fathers issue rosaries to their less enlightened neighbours, who until the missionaries came had to rely on amulets made of python hearts. Between these centres of human endeavour, an uncharted belt of forest fringes the lake, and climbs the sides of the great cold crater, until these slope so steep that not even a creeper can catch hold. For the last thousand feet the rock is bare.
Forest rings the crater, stretching further than even you from your advantageous position can see. Nor can you see through the peacock-blue water to the bottom of the lake. They say it hasn't one.
On this particular day of your ethereal view, there is even a bit of human interest in that splendid but desolate vista. At the southern end of the lake a herald of European culture, a broad-beamed steam tug, lies black and ugly on the fantastically blue water. In the bows you may see two figures; from your remote standpoint, insignificant enough. You can discern the features no more than you can read the passions of the tiny puppets holding each other close, as if for defence against the indifferent majesty of nature.
From your elevation you can see a third figure. It is thrusting its way through the forest that borders the lake at the head of a train of diminutive black carriers. Ignorant of each other, the two groups of marionettes are drawn by wires of Fate, invisible even to you, into a contact all but fatal to both.”